From Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars, explore the world of human spaceflight with NASA each week on the official podcast of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Listen to in-depth conversations with the astronauts, scientists and engineers who make it possible.
On episode 380, four flight controllers from NASA’s Mission Control Center discuss how they create astronauts’ daily schedules, track where all equipment is stored, and manage electricity and internet on the space station. This episode was recorded December 18, 2024.
Transcript
Courtney Beasley
Houston, we have a podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Cente, Episode 380 Mission Control, schedule and inventory. I’m Courtney Beasley, and I will be your host today on this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers and astronauts all to let you know what’s going on in the world of human space flight and more. The Mission Control Center, or MCC, is the iconic epicenter of human space flight operations. It takes a large, talented team to ensure the safety and success of any mission, whether to low Earth orbit or beyond. You may have seen depictions of Mission Control in movies or seen video of it during a NASA broadcast, the mission control team is there. 24/7 365 days a year monitoring all of the systems and activities aboard our laboratory in orbit. Each day is covered by three shifts of controllers who do a handover between shifts in order for everything to run smoothly. There are a lot of consoles in International Space Station MCC and each one has an important job. We’ll be dedicating six episodes to covering the positions in Space Station Mission Control, what they do and how they work together to keep the orbiting lab operating smoothly. In this episode, we will be covering the Operations Planner, or Ops Plan. Kelly Goodyear, the Inventory Stowage Officer, or ISO Alex Arredondo, the Plug In Plan and utilization officer. Or Pluto Joshua Dow and the Operations Support Officer or Oso, Daniel Henkes together, these consoles cover the scheduling and inventory tracking of everything on the space station, from the astronauts daily schedules where all the equipment is stored, to how to plug in anything that needs electricity and even internet. Let’s find out how they keep it all straight and what to do when something floats away. Recorders to flight speed, Ops Plan.
Kelly Goodyear
Go
Courtney Beasley
ISO
Alex Arredondo
Go
Courtney Beasley
PLUTO
Joshua Dow
Go
Courtney Beasley
OSO
Daniel Henkes
Go
Courtney Beasley
We are go for Houston. We have a podcast.
<Intro Music>
Courtney Beasley
Okay, it’s always so interesting to me to hear everyone’s path to NASA and how they got where they are now, especially our flight control team. So I want to go around the table here, and let’s start with Ops Plan. Kelly, can you tell us a little bit about your background, what you studied in school, and your path to becoming a flight controller?
Kelly Goodyear
Yeah. So I think, like a lot of people around here, as a child, I dreamed about being an astronaut. I really wanted to go to the moon, and so that was always something on my mind. And then when I was a teenager, I saw Apollo 13, and I thought, that’s what I want to do. I want to be those people solving the problems, saving the day. So I went off and I got an mechanical engineering degree, studied really hard, worked really hard, and then I got hired in for ISS operations planning straight out of college. And I’ve been doing that for over 20 years now, and I love it, and I’m very blessed every day.
Courtney Beasley
Great. And what about ISO?
Alex Arredondo
Hi, so I’m from Brownsville, Texas. As far as college goes, I started as a physics major at Texas A&M. I was there for two years, and honestly, I was struggling academically, and I had to leave the school. So I transferred to UT Dallas, and that’s where I ended up getting my mechanical engineering degree. And I started working at NASA right after college, right at the beginning of 2020, as far as how I got here in my space flight interests. So, like Kelly, since I was little, I was very much into science and space. I used to watch Space Shuttle launches with my dad and just try to learn any science thing I could learn from him. And love that when I was in college, I sort of decided that I might just go for the dream I’ve always had. And I tried looking up jobs at NASA and applied to be a Flight Controller through every single posting I could find, through every single contractor, and, you know, ended up working out
Courtney Beasley
and Pluto, what about you? What was your path like to get to NASA?
Joshua Dow
Yeah, I was born and raised in Houston. It’s funny, my first time at JSC was for my interview. I’d never been to the space center or anything. Working in space was kind of the farthest thing from my mind. My undergrad degree is a little bit different. I wasn’t an engineer. I went for essentially a business degree, but I was more of a tech guy. I was working as a IT professional at the time. So when I graduated, I was fortunate. The tech market was really, really hot. So I applied at a lot of different kind of public service positions. Kind of the idea of working in a cubicle or for some big company for the next 50 years of my life. I couldn’t stomach it, so I applied for kind of the coolest jobs I could think of, and a buddy sent me this position. I applied. I never thought I would get a call back, and I got a call back, and they kept calling me back, and I took this job over another job I had lined up at the time, but, yeah, I applied for a lot of a lot of different agencies for jobs that just sounded really cool. And I’m lucky I got to land on this one
Courtney Beasley
Awesome, that seems to be the case with fellow Houstonians growing up in Houston and not visiting the Space Center, I’ve heard that so often, and it was essentially the same for me. I’m from Houston as well, and had the same experience. So love it now, though I love being here and OSO what about you? What did you study and what path did you take to become a flight controller?
Daniel Henkes
Yeah, so a similar path as kind of people have mentioned. I started with Apollo 13 watching that, and instantly it was like, Oh, that’s a pretty cool job. I didn’t think that would actually be a career you can make it out of. I grew up in San Antonio, so not too far away. And it wasn’t until I actually started a rocketry program back in my high school that I was like, learned about engineering, all that kind of stuff, and then went on to get an engineering degree from Trinity in San Antonio, so a small little school there, and then actually joined the Pathways Program here in 2017 went through a couple internships, and then finally got on in 2020 and have loved it ever since I went and got my instructor cert before becoming A flight controller. That was a lot of fun. So we all kind of have different little paths, but kind of ended up in the same room.
Courtney Beasley
I love that. And what about the training to become a flight controller? I know there’s a flight operations director at boot camp that some of you have taken that has evolved over the years. What has training been like for all of you from the start?
Kelly Goodyear
Yeah, so it’s certainly evolved a whole lot since I started, but, but absolutely same kind of thing where we went, and you kind of get basic ISS classes about all the different systems, and you learn a little bit more about your system as you go into your systems training. But it’s, it’s a great way to meet other people that are the same age as you, and kind of get entrenched in the culture here. And then as you finish that, and you go into your discipline specific training, you know, for the planning team, we have quite a few positions, so it’s a long road to get into the front room, lots of different certs to sit in the back room, and some other positions. So it took a long time, a lot of work, but it was great.
Alex Arredondo
Yeah, as far as ISO goes, we start with boot camp, which is actually where I met Dan. Right after boot camp, we start our FCR flow, so our front room flow. And we’re a little bit different in some other consoles, as we don’t have any back rooms. It’s only us. So our first cert is to sit in the front room and mission control that takes about a year and a half. Ish, it took me a little bit longer because the pandemic hit right as I started. So we had to adjust how we do a lot of our training and switch over from in person classes to virtual classes after getting your FCR cert and becoming a front room flight controller, that’s when we then start training for instructor flow down the line or getting to some other alternate side quests, as I like to call them around here.
Joshua Dow
Yeah. Same for Pluto. We have a pretty similar training path after boot camp. We do have a back room the Hydra position is our is our back room position. So that’s typically the first thing we train for, first. What’s recent about Pluto and OCA is that OCA is administratively a part of Pluto group now, so some people will go branch off and be an OCA. Oddly enough, they report to the ops plan console, on console. It’s a little strange. Yeah, it’s a little strange. So about half of our trainees will go be an OCA first, and about half of our trainees will be a Pluto back room first. Usually you kind of marinate in that position for one to three years or more. That all kind of depends on how it’s going and when a spot opens up in the flow for the front room. That could be another year or two where a lot like some of the core systems, where we have to simulate and get certified in a simulation before we can get that front room cert. And also a lot of on on the job training in the front room at least six to seven or more weeks, depending on how those go, of actually sitting doing the job next to somebody who’s certified.
Daniel Henkes
Yeah, so, little bit different, but about the same as a lot of these other so we go through our basic training, and then we learn about all the different systems and the maintenance that we can do on ISS, which is it gets more every day it feels like but we’ll then go into a back room flow, which is more of just kind of a planning our back rooms are responsible for kind of long term training of what does our maintenance look like preventative maintenance, tracking all that kind of stuff. So that really gives you a very good console experience. It was it like to work in the front room, to talk with other flight controllers, come up with some solutions to issues that we may run into, and then we go through the same kind of certification flows where you’ll sit in Sims for, you know, year, year and a half and be able to test problem solving skills. You’ll test your you know, your risk discussions, all of that, to your flight director, to the other team members, and that’s really the path that most people take to get to flight controller flow.
Courtney Beasley
So each of you touched a little bit on front rooms and back rooms. Can someone try to explain that for someone who would have no idea or background on what a back room or front room is,
Kelly Goodyear
Yeah, so the front room are the people that are sitting in Mission Control alongside the flight director and Capcom, probably the room that you see when you’re looking in movies like Apollo 13 or if you’re watching NASA TV at certain times a day, and those are the people that are reporting directly to the flight director, like I said. But behind all of those people, for most positions, you’ve got a huge team of support folks that are sitting in other places, most of them in Mission Control, also just in other rooms. The back room planning has got a whole just gob of people that sit in a room down the hall that are doing longer range planning for a week or two out that all of that supports, it’s kind of a symbiotic relationship where we’re feeding information to and from those teams, and then we have people in the back room that are supporting the real time execution, OCA, like we talked about, ODF, which Is the procedures, folks. And then I have also a RPE, real time planning engineer that is kind of helping make sure all the timeline updates get made, helping with configuration management and working with ODF and OCA to make sure things are on board for the crew.
Courtney Beasley
Before we dive a little deeper, I want to hear from each of you on what your console does for the International Space Station and what some of your duties are on console. So let’s switch it up and start with OSO.
Daniel Henkes
Yeah, so OSO has a really interesting role, so we’re responsible for any of the maintenance on the ISS, so we kind of break it into preventative maintenance and then corrective maintenance. So something that we know is coming, like an oil change on the ground. You know that that’s coming up. You need to do it soon. And then you have the Corrective maintenance. Something breaks. We got to go fix it. So we’re responsible for that as well as a lot of the habitability that’s on the ISS as well. So where the crew sleeps, eats, and of course, what everyone asked about is the space toilets. We’re responsible for all of that hardware. So we really encompass a wide range of systems, so we have to get a lot of that system specific training, and then we pass that on to the crew. So we’ll do a lot of skills based training on the crew before they go up to the ISS for their mission. So they’ll learn, you know, anytime you’re using a ratchet, you know, your torque wrenches, all of that, we try to teach them ahead of time, but then when they get up there, we’ll write all the procedures for them to execute as they’re doing their maintenance on the ISS. And then so you’ll have the Oso console position in the front room or the FCR that’ll be following along with the crew, checking where they are, keeping the flight control team and the flight director, where and if any issues come up, or anything like that, we’ll work through our process in order to fix it. And I’ll add that also in our group, we have a another position called OSA MEC, which is responsible for what’s called the common birthing mechanism, or the CBM that attaches the internal or the pressurized parts of the ISS together, as well as visiting vehicles like our Cygnus that’s currently up there, so they’ll be on console to drive bolts and all the fun things associated with that awesome.
Courtney Beasley
Awesome, and what about Pluto? What does your console do for the International Space Station?
Joshua Dow
Yeah, Pluto. It’s sort of an outdated acronym, to be honest with you. Plug in plan or plug in Port utilization. Officer, I’ve heard both acronyms. The quickest way to boil it down is we’re kind of the IT, the IT, guys and gals of the space station. We manage quite an array of systems, and they’re kind of ever growing every day, chiefly the laptops on the ISS that the crews use every day. We manage those, the routers, firewalls, switches, access points, as well as a couple kind of ancillary systems, like the wireless instrumentation system. It measures strain on the structure of ISS. We’re not the structural engineers, but we give that data to the structural engineers. But since it plugs into a network, we operate it kind of the namesake of the group. We also track the plug in operations, I guess you could say of the space station. So we we track where kind of end items are plugged in that go into, basically like a wall outlet. Is the best way to analogize that. So we track that for not overdrawing anything on amperage or voltage drop. We also keep in mind kind of criticality we don’t want to plug some low importance item where we have a really, really high importance item that needs kind of its own power source. So yeah, our console manages quite a bit. We do have a backer, and, like I said, who’s kind of more of a heads down position. So that position will usually work more like, you know, really heads down it tasks. They’ll do a lot of the command. Link to the space station, where as our front row position typically does kind of the same job, but also stays more in the loop with what’s going on for the day. They’re the one, obviously, who communicates with the flight director and kind of coordinates with the rest of the team
Courtney Beasley
I know. I’ve been known to throw a break or two back at my house. How do you guys avoid that happening on the International Space Station?
Joshua Dow
Yes, we avoid it by kind of not getting into the situation in the first place. We also have a good team of folks on the ground who kind of pre plan exactly where everything’s going to be plugged in exactly when. But kind of like with anything in space flight, the plans can change really, really fast. So sometimes crew will call down saying, Hey, can I plug this thing in over here? And we’ll have to do sort of a quick analysis and be sure that we’re not violating anything, and we’ll tell the flight director, yes, flight they can plug it in there. So a lot of training, some of it’s just pure memory, like, No, we know that can’t be plugged in there. Some of it’s just, yeah, we know, but it’s always just kind of mission cognizance, right? And keeping as accurate of ground tools as as we can to keep up with the crew.
Courtney Beasley
Great, And ISO, what about you?
Alex Arredondo
Yeah, so ISO stands for inventory and storage officer. So we do what it sounds like, we track all of the inventory on board the International Space Station. And that’s a really important task to do, because there’s such a huge amount of items on board the space station, and there’s a lot of crew rotation with relatively high frequency. So we like to sort of compare it as the state station being a five bedroom house with new tenants every six months or so, and everyone’s just leaving their stuff behind, so we need to figure out what to do with every single one of those items and also where they are, because they might be needed for activities. For to do that, we use IMS, or the inventory management system, which is a software that has all of the information for everything that’s on board and that has also been flown back or trash from the space station. It has information such as names, serial Numbers, dimensions, even what to do with certain hardware whether its broken or not, is it suspected to maybe be broken and any other miscellaneous notes so with that information we help flight controllers like the people around this table, figure out what they need for their activities and where they can find them so the crew has any easy going day once they get into those activities. Another one of our really big duties is planning the unpacking and the packing of visiting vehicles so whenever a Cygnus or a Cargo Dragon gets on board we work with the commercial partners for those vehicles so that we can communicate the state of the vehicle as we pack and unpack it and also to make sure that whenever we do pack it it meets the needs of that vehicle in terms of center of gravity constraints.
Courtney Beasley
and ops plan. What about you?
Kelly Goodyear
All right, so ops plan is the operations planner, and at a very high level, we’re maintaining and managing the timeline that the crew and the ground execute from right? So it’s, it’s the whole team is using that timeline to do what they need to do. Every day, those timelines get generated at least six months before any mission. So it’s a very iterative process that gets built upon over the time it gets refined. We’re integrating the science maintenance, outfitting visiting vehicle requirements for an entire increment when we start building those plans. And then when we get on console, it’s it’s really maintaining them and adjusting as needed, because things do sometimes not go as planned, or things change, new requirements come in, and stuff like that. So we have to have a little bit of knowledge about all of the different systems on board. We have to know, for example, which what every activity requires as far as resources. So if it needs audio or video support, for example, that’s information that we have to have to be able to schedule it properly. We’re going to keep track of where every activity happens on ISS, so that we can make sure that we don’t have all the crew members bunched up in one little space, so that everybody has enough room to do everything they’re supposed to do. And then we’re also going to be looking at operational constraints. So for example, if there’s an activity that would render an exercise device either inoperable or you can’t get to it, then we’d have to know that to be able to build the timeline. So we use all of this put the timeline together and to maintain the timeline and change it to the timeline. It’s like, it’s like putting a puzzle together. It’s, it’s kind of fun. And then on console, we’re monitoring the execution of that timeline for the ground in the crew as well. And sometimes things go faster than planned. Some things, things go slower than planned. And so that’s where we are feeding information to and from those longer range planners to adjust to any impacts that might come from execution. And then we are responsible for taking all the change requests. So of course, there’s paperwork, so anytime somebody needs to change the timeline we’re evaluating those change requests and processing them, getting them into the timeline, updating it and getting it on board for the crew, so they have the latest as well as the ground
Courtney Beasley
I know that PAO works really closely with ops plan. Thanks for everything that all of you do. You all are tracking so much in your day to day, and I assume that’s why the handover period is so crucial between shifts. What does a handover period look like for you guys between each orbit shift.
Alex Arredondo
So for ISO, we do a pretty good job of keeping a handover log between like during our shifts. So whenever the next person comes and takes a shift over from us, it’s pretty easy to just have them read the paperwork while we keep working and answering crew calls real time, because sometimes while you’re trying to do a handover, the crew is trying to pack a visiting vehicle, it’s about to leave in an hour, and that can get really hectic. So I think being pre prepared is a really important part of handovers. Another thing that we like to do, or I like to do at least, is hand write, just little very important notes and draft a, what we call an AFD call, which is when the flight controllers check in with the flight director and give it to my oncoming just so they have a sort of draft of what I was thinking would be a good idea to let the team know about what happened in the previous shift.
Courtney Beasley
Any other interesting handover stories you guys have about how your handover shifts go?
Daniel Henkes
Yeah, I mean, I’ll add for OSO it can very much depend on where the crew is in the maintenance. So if something went really wrong that morning, it’s figuring out, you know, what are we going to do for the rest of the day? So once the crew comes back, usually their midday meal luckily aligns with handover sometimes. So we can figure out, Hey, what are they going to do after their midday meal? How are we going to, you know, fix whatever issue came up, and really, we do the same kind of thing. We’ll keep a handover log that contains all that information as well as we can try to keep pretty detailed logs as well. So anytime crew calls down, anytime we have conversations on the flight loop or with our MER counterparts or engineering counterparts. We’ll keep detailed logs so that the oncoming shift knows that we had those conversations, that we talked about, these risk trades, things like that.
Courtney Beasley
Great. And I know I mentioned briefly that PAO works very closely with ops plan. How do your console positions work together to support the International Space Station.
Kelly Goodyear
Well, I work with all these guys regularly. I work with everybody regularly, right? I mean, that’s kind of inherent part of the timeline, is reaching out, asking questions about things I might need to move or change to make some other request work.
Alex Arredondo
I think Kelly has probably the hardest job out of all of us.
Kelly Goodyear
I think you have the hardest job
Alex Arredondo
Im actually, funny enough, I’ve asked crew members, flown crew members before, like, you know, being in space and coming back down, what’s one of the flight control positions that you would never want to do? And most of the time they say ISO and Ops Plan. Those are the ones that seem very, very hard and are very dynamic all the time.
Kelly Goodyear
Take it as a compliment,
Courtney Beasley
As you should
Alex Arredondo
yeah, exactly as far as integration goes. So I can think of one example, say, a SpaceX mission is about to arrive. We talked to Pluto and we talked to Oso to know when they need their hardware, and if, for some reason, their hardware is needed, you know, within the first you know, 24 to 72 hours after the vehicle docks, that’s when we coordinate with ops plan to make sure that we have enough cargo ops time to meet the requirements of the stuff that’s actually needed to get out in a priority to be able to complete the objectives that the team has.
Joshua Dow
Yeah, that’s one of the cool things about space flight, is that it really is a team sport. We say that a lot it really takes for ISS really a worldwide team, but focusing on FCR One, we really are operating really, really integrated together. As far as Pluto systems themselves, our system, you know, the crew is touching it all day, every day. They’re always on their iPads. They’re always on their laptops. So, you know, if there’s any kink in the chain of the system, you know, we know really, really quickly. And same thing with the other consoles. A lot of the other consoles intersect with us and kind of, kind of unique ways. So you know, the plan can’t get on board without without our system. So Ops Plan relies on our servers and whatnot actually functioning properly for the crew to be able to look at the plan and make, you know, inputs to the plan and leave little crew notes and mark things complete. You know, OSO, we rely on them for for cable routing, for example. So if we want to route a cable through a space that we have no idea what that space looks like or what else is in there, we talk to OSO, you know, if we need a piece of hardware for an activity, we have to talk to ISO about that. So you really can’t go a day in mission control without talking to at least, you know, three or four different consoles. And let’s just, it’s just the quietest day ever, in which case you may not talk to anybody in particular, but that’s, that’s a rare day.
Courtney Beasley
Happen much, right?
Joshua Dow
It’s a rare day, yep.
Courtney Beasley
And then are there other consoles not present right now that you all work closely with on certain operations?
Daniel Henkes
Yeah, we work as Josh mentioned, same kind of thing we work with not only the people here. We have, like aju mentioned the core systems. So our ETHOS, SPARTAN, ADCO, CRONUS, that are there, 24/7 usually it’s their hardware that we’re trying to fix, if we’re honest. So we have to work with them a lot about their systems, and talk with them make sure that we have all the correct safing in place to make sure the crew is safe while executing the maintenance. We also have our international partners, our payload community, that we have to work with the same kind of thing of like trying to make sure science keeps going. We want to make sure that our hardware for the ISS systems is working correctly. So we really get to talk with a lot of people. I’d say my inbox usually has a couple different nations that we’re talking with throughout the day, which is, I mean, such a cool environment to be in.
Kelly Goodyear
Yeah, for planning, we definitely interact with the biomedical engineering console position the BME’s, They’re kind of junior planners, since they’re in charge of a lot of the different things that are going to fall in the timeline. How much work the crew has, if their exercise is planned, right, stuff like that. And then, obviously we have international partner planners around the world that we absolutely talk to every single day, every shift. And we’re, you know, we’re in charge of integrating all of the operations, but certainly they’re, they’re managing their pieces and parts and filtering that through us. So it’s a, it’s a really great relationship and definitely one of, one of the highlights of my job is working with those different countries.
Alex Arredondo
Yeah, as far as ISO goes, within the flight control room, we really talk to everyone who has any hardware on board or is having the crew do an activity where they’re using an item. We also talk a lot to our stowage counterparts in Huntsville, the POIC stowage console. They’re very helpful when it comes to all the science that goes on board. As far as IPs go. We talk to the Aries console and the Cosmo consoles in JAXA and ESA, and they are invaluable to us whenever we’re trying to coordinate things, either in the in the JEM or in Columbus.
Courtney Beasley
So we’ve hit on back rooms and how it takes a huge team to do your job in the best possible way. What other support do you guys have for your consoles?
Daniel Henkes
Yeah, so I mentioned earlier, we have our engineering counterparts that either design the hardware or responsible to maintain it, especially when we’re doing maintenance, things rarely go easily or as we expected them. So that team definitely helps. As the hardware they designed it, they know everything about it that we can talk to them about questions, which configurations will be good for the hardware, if it’s going to be in something off nominal. And then, you know, as we mentioned, all the all the different console positions here, as well as our international partners, if we have to talk to them, if we’re doing maintenance in their module.
Joshua Dow
Yeah. Same setup for us. We have an engineering support team. Most of them work over at the software development and integration lab, kind of right next to the Neutral Buoyancy Lab. And over there we have sort of an identical lab set up well as identical as we can make it lab setup that kind of mirrors the networks on the space station. And those guys check in with us every day if there’s a problem that we can’t solve on station, or sort of a coding challenge or an engineering challenge that is beyond the scope of Pluto’s knowledge, we coordinate with those guys, and they’re really great. They’re also sort of the coders behind our system. Most Pluto’s aren’t software developers. Some of us are, but we choose to do this job, and, you know, there’s a clear division of responsibility there. They make a lot of the architectural and system changes. We’re just kind of the operators. So, yeah, we always have a good engineering support team behind us.
Alex Arredondo
For ISO, like I mentioned, we don’t have a back room. So if I’m sitting on console and I’m having some issues most of the time, I’ll go talk directly to the console whose hardware we’re dealing with, or who activity is working. So for example, if they can’t find a wrench, then I’ll talk to Dan, and we’ll find an alternate location as far as more nitty gritty stowage questions about what items will be used in the longer period of time, or the bigger, larger stowage plan on board for the space station. I talk a lot just to my office, and I send a bunch of teams, messages and phone calls while I’m on console. Within ISO, we have different POCs, so there’s like a Pluto POC for ISO, and there’s an OSO POC for ISO. There are ISOs that are also well versed in the other systems hardware, so they become really valuable whenever it comes to having on console support.
Kelly Goodyear
Yeah, kind of, as I mentioned before, we lean on our long range planning room a whole lot, primarily because the increment leader, the lead for the current mission is, is there all the time during the day, and so they’re, they’re able to provide us some good direction, sometimes on priorities of requirements and things like that. It’s sort of like our engineering help that we get to make sure that we’re able to able to meet the requirements that we need on a particular day, but but also keeping the mission going in the right direction. And then we talked mipsers already a little bit, but happy to go into that a little bit more. So the ODF operations data file console is primarily in charge of procedures, so we have crew procedures and ground procedures that they’ll process updates to regularly, all day, every day. They’re at the heart of that. And as we get changes, it’s their job to make sure that those are updated and ready for whoever’s going to execute them. The OCA, which we talked about, that orbital communications adapter, I believe, console, which was for many, many years, part of the ops plan team group, but in some reorgs, has gone, like you said, administratively to the to the Pluto group, but they still report to the ops plan, and their main function is to uplink and downlink files to and from the station. So they support the entire flight control team. They’re making sure that the timelines, procedures, crew message and other operational data get on board for the crew, and they’re bringing stuff down so system statuses, which everybody basically is relying on, and all those pretty pictures that we see on social media, OCA is responsible for bringing those down. And then we talked about real time planning engineer already, but they are. They’re kind of the junior ops plan, I’ll say, making sure that the timeline changes are getting incorporated and turned around in a timely fashion.
Daniel Henkes
Yeah. And I’ll add too, Alex actually gave me the idea of two. I forgot. We actually have like, 10 people in our office that just sit down write procedures all day, every day, for our increments. So when we’re planning out, you know, we have maintenance three weeks out, a month out, we know that it’s coming up. We need to write a crew procedure to do it. We have a whole group of people back there that are just chugging through procedures one after another, making sure they get on the plan correctly. So we have a lot of really good support back in the office as well.
Courtney Beasley
When we take people into the viewing room in mission control, we see little mascots on each console position. Can each of you tell us what your console mascot is?
Kelly Goodyear
Yeah, we have an hourglass sitting on our console, and I think it’s kind of got a little bit of a double meaning. Obviously, hourglass is time going by timeline. That’s a pretty straightforward one. There’s also sort of a side joke that we do, timeline reviews many times a day to make sure that tomorrow or in the next few days look okay. And we time those so you can actually turn the hourglass and get people you know moving on the on the timeline review, and get them done by the time, but the sand falls through.
Courtney Beasley
That’s such a good idea. I think that would make me nervous, though.
Kelly Goodyear
I know I can’t reach it, though, so I don’t usually do that.
Alex Arredondo
I didn’t know you could use it for that.
Kelly Goodyear
It’s an hour, though. So most timeline reviews y’all take way longer than that.
Alex Arredondo
Blank space.
Courtney Beasley
ISO, what about you?
Alex Arredondo
For ISO, I don’t know if we still have it or not, but we used to have a tetris game in our console, and that’s just to signify how we basically play a game with Tetris whenever we’re moving all these really big things and cushions and bags around the space station. Surprisingly, the space station wasn’t designed to have a bunch of really pretty closets all over the place to house all the hardware that people fly up. So it really is a game of Tetris trying to get things organized.
Joshua Dow
Pluto has Pluto the dog, as in the cartoon character, and we have, I know we have at least one little Pluto somewhere on there. And then for our backroom position, Hydra, we have a little mini plush moon of Hydra, which is a moon of Pluto.
Daniel Henkes
Yeah, for, fittingly enough, our OSO one is a huge wrench. I don’t even know the size of it. It’s definitely not anything we have on the ISS, but it’s a it’s zip tied up to the console, and just kind of anchors in there is a huge wrench that anytime you know, crews turn in a wrench. We’re there to help support.
Courtney Beasley
I love that, That brings me to my next question. Flight controllers are known for their procedures, and it seems like everything is almost completely flawless most of the time. How do each of you deal with discrepancies in your tracking? What if something ISO floats away and goes missing? I know that happened with Frank Rubio’s tomato, and everyone was so interested in that. What happens when something like that happens? And how do all of you deal with discrepancies?
Alex Arredondo
Well, for cargo, sometimes we’re lucky, and the item itself might have what we call an RFID tag, and we have a system on board called realm, which basically scans certain modules and sees if it can read that tag. So that can be really helpful to us if it’s available and if it’s an item without an RFID tag, like a tomato, thankfully doesn’t have RFID in it. We put activities. So I worked with Kelly to put activities on a timeline called wanted posters, or we draft an actual like wanted poster with big wanted letters in the top and a picture of the item and some descriptions and possible locations where it could be, so the crew can have some time to go look for that item. If not, you know, there’s not much many places where it can go, so it’ll turn up floating around somewhere at some point.
Courtney Beasley
So interesting. I did not know that about the tags. Yeah, it’s really neat.
Alex Arredondo
Yeah, all of the CTBs or cargo transfer bags, where the white bags that you might see in pictures that have serial numbers on the side also have those RFID tags in there. So that can be really useful, because really big things and really important things sometimes get lost in the space station. There’s just a lot of stuff up there.
Courtney Beasley
I can’t even imagine. What about the rest of you guys? Any how do you deal with discrepancies?
Joshua Dow
I mean a big part of being a flight controller is kind of just being ready for the discrepancies. So I’m sure the rest of the folks in the room will resonate with we have sort of a plan A, a plan B, and a plan C, and usually through like, G or F, we have, you know, multiple options we can pursue, whether that’s, you know, deferring the activity, maybe coming back to it later. Maybe we have spare hardware. If there’s a piece of hardware that’s not working the way we expect, and a lot of our console prep is being ready for all those contingencies. So when you’re sort of reviewing the timeline or reviewing activities that you’re going to be responsible for, once you’re in that room just having those plans in mind and discussing it with your team about what we’ll do if this doesn’t go according to plan.
Daniel Henkes
Yeah, so I mean. I would say, rarely a maintenance goes swimmingly. There’s always, you know, something that comes up. One of the most fun experiences I had is there was a piece of hardware we had to install, and there we were missing. There was a fluid line that was running right through it. So we we brought it back, we had the crew take it out and temp stow it, and we were able to go over to building nine, which is our space vehicle mock up facility, where we have all the mock ups of the station, and be able to actually work on the hardware. Find a way. We actually had Luca with us, who was the astronaut that knew a decent amount about the hardware, so he was able to actually work on it. We developed procedures for it, and then we’re able to, shortly thereafter, install the piece of hardware. So that was a really cool experience of, you know, using the resources we have here, and then just being able to find a solution to a complex problem.
Joshua Dow
It’s great when you have an astronaut Capcom, it is and sometimes they’ll just say, Hey, I’ve actually seen that this problem before, on board. Tell them to do this. Yeah, problem solved.
Courtney Beasley
I’m sure that is so helpful.
Alex Arredondo
Sometimes we don’t have the luxury of time, and we have to solve things really, really quickly, and that’s when I guess we just all turn into each other in the flight control room and have over the air conversation with Capcom and the flight director to see what the best course of action would be for that situation. So that ends up helping a lot, and that’s also where your training becomes a valuable because you have to know your system to be able to participate in those kind of quick decisions.
Courtney Beasley
Well, that leads me perfectly into my next question. I want to hear from each of you on a story that you can share on how your console has worked together to solve a problem that has occurred on station with another console. It doesn’t have to be a console sitting here.
Kelly Goodyear
You know, last was that last week we had a, you know, SpaceX 31 undocking flipped because of weather. We go into a process where we, we call it major replan, where we scrap the timeline and kind of start over. And I’m pretty sure I worked with every single one of these consoles, probably all of them, because we do kind of start over. So like I said, before we start building timelines six months out. But obviously things change and get overcome by events, as we say. And it’s important to be able to talk to, I think I talked to OSO about, I think we had the NRAL stuff on the timeline, the NanoRacks, air lock, and we were really trying to preserve that really important operation while also trying to to figure out where to put a vehicle undocking. And that’s a not an insignificant neither of those are insignificant things to get onto a timeline. I don’t it was all just part of the normal course of a major replan, and unfortunately, due to some of the weather in Florida, we’re doing a lot of those these days. But it is, it is a time where we work very closely with a lot of the different consoles and the international partners as well to to really, basically, like I said, start over with a timeline, putting it back together, like Humpty Dumpty
Joshua Dow
Pluto kind of recently, has started working these projects. They’re called technology demonstrations. So we operate these little telemetry computers that connect to pieces of hardware that other consoles manage. So naturally, we’re going to have a lot of really close coordination with those folks. One example would be, maybe the EDAR system. It’s essentially a space suit telemetry system that operates from the suit, sends the telemetry through our little telemetry computers. We call them mini PCs, back to the ground. So it’s a really, really interesting operation, maybe for the first time, where Pluto can sort of give a piece of information to the EVA console, because we’re not getting the telemetry from a space suit that we’re expecting. So being able to work closely with those folks, kind of for the first time, to really impact the core systems a little more than we’re used to, is sort of a new frontier for Pluto, and it’s really, really exciting. So
Daniel Henkes
yeah, as Kelly mentioned, that we’re actually in the middle of a nano racks. We’ll call them sorties. It’s basically we’ll take a payload outside, and I think that one touches almost every flight control discipline, as well as our international partners, our Canadian partners, for the robotic arm in which we’re having to try to get it on the timeline, we’ve got to get everything unstowed from around the area, and work with ISO for that, Pluto has Some actions as well that we worked through in a flow chart, that we’re just trying to keep the team all together and doing it and trying to get it on the timeline, as you said, during a SpaceX undock, which was definitely a very complex problem, but we were able to pull it out.
Alex Arredondo
I can think of two pretty specific instances where I had to work with different people around the table. So the first one, I think I can’t remember, was crew five or crew six undock, but we had just finished packing the vehicle, and one of the last steps that crew has to do is take pictures of the vehicle and send them down and the ground evaluates those pictures to make sure that all of the bags are packed as expected, and all of the buckles are buckled and straps are strapped. As soon as they went to downlink their pictures and send them down to the ground for us to evaluate. We have a one hour window to get those pictures evaluate and give words to the crew. Within that one hour window, we lost some systems, and there were some issues logging in and bringing the pictures down to where we were pretty much scrambling quite a bit, and I had to work with Off Plan Pluto and the OCA console to make sure that we had Wi Fi, that the pictures were in the laptop that could downlink them. And thankfully, we were able to get them down and tell the crew that they didn’t have to make any more changes before they could undock. But if that wouldn’t have been the case, we would have to push undock by either a few hours or just completely miss the opportunity for that day. The other is when there was recently, we’ve had to reconfigure Crew Dragons to add some seats for what we call pair co ops. And to be able to add those seats, we basically had to coordinate with so many people, including OSO and ICE, which are the systems engineers that talk a lot to SpaceX and with the Surgeons and just a huge amount of people to be able to build those seats the way that would be safe for the crew,
Courtney Beasley
I know that most, if not all, of your consoles are staffed 365 days a year. 24/7 Do you ever really get to feel like you’re off, or do you always kind of feel like you need to be a little bit in touch.
Joshua Dow
I think the folks in this room, because we’re not the air quote, core systems ops plan maybe probably works the most, but our console is only staffed for the orbit one, so the overnight shift and the Orbit Two shift, so the daytime shift during special operations, we’ll also sometimes do the orbit three shift if we’re patching and updating things. I think, you know, our group is pretty good about enforcing a work life management. You know, there’s times when you’re going to be on call, there’s times when you’re going to be working the overnight shift, but I think one of the really great things about this job for me is that I feel like we do a pretty good job at work life management. I mean, there’s going to be months of time where you’re working on where you’re working on a really, really hard project, or a project that just, you know, is taking up a lot of your time in your life. But NASA, you know, over the course of ISS operations, has figured out. Not only is rest and recovery important for the crew, it’s also really, really important for flight controllers too. It’s really time involved and expensive to train up a flight controller, so we try to avoid burnout and turnover as much as possible. So
Daniel Henkes
yeah, I think very similar. So, OSO we’ll basically be there just when the crew is awake for the most part, or we’re doing maintenance. So we’re there for the orbit one and orbit two shifts, so the overnight shifts and then the normal daily shift. And so we’ll just be on call the rest. And usually there’s a, there’s a pretty good balance of when you’re on console and when you’re not off console, working other things where you get, you know, a little bit more time off. So I think there is a really good balance when you’re on call for weekends, we take advantage of, you know, just being in Houston, doing stuff in Houston, and just, you know, following the, you know, the time constraints of when to call and things like that every you have to check in, or things like that. So for the most part, it’s pretty balanced. You do get some time off, and especially this time of the year, I feel like a lot of people are are taking time off and being able to support that.
Alex Arredondo
Yeah, I think management does a really good job at knowing that we can’t perform at our best if we’re not feeling our best. So they sometimes can even sense where we’re starting to be tired or burnt out or just came off from a really long mission and could use a break. And sometimes they even ask us or persuade us to be like, Hey, you should take a couple of days off, just regroup a little bit and come back when you’re you’re feeling 100%
Kelly Goodyear
Yeah, I definitely feel like, you know, I’ve been around a long time, and that that culture has shifted a whole lot, and it’s, I do feel like these days there is a huge emphasis on the team getting rest. You know, be on when you’re on, but, but unplug a little bit and get some rest. I think it’s interesting too, though. You know, most of these teams are on call when the crew is asleep, but that that’s when the planning team is doing a huge part of what they do. And so it does mean that we call people a lot in the evenings. So being on call is definitely a thing. But I think when you’re not on call, not on console, I think I think a lot of us have have really perfected turning it off.
Courtney Beasley
Well, we got to hear about your journeys to NASA. I am interested to know what some special areas of study are that you have found most beneficial to someone in your roles.
Daniel Henkes
Yeah. So for us, it’s we tend to have a lot of engineers, I think that’s you’ll see in a lot of these positions. But because of the the wide breadth of mechanical, electrical, fluid systems that we might do maintenance on, we kind of have a a lot of different specialties of engineering as well as just science in general, that bring their own level of expertise. And it allows us to really be able to do all of that different kind of maintenance, all of us learning from each other. Because you really kind of have to be a jack of all trades and learn all the different systems in respect. And really the biggest thing that we look for is just problem solving. So we have a lot of things, especially as ISS ages, things tend to break, and tend to break in creative ways. So trying to find creative solutions to to perform the maintenance on and solve those problems is really what most of our group does.
Joshua Dow
PLUTO’s have kind of a unique background? Probably 60% of us have some sort of aerospace or engineering degree, but for the rest of us, like myself, we have sort of an IT or business background, because we’re a very, you know, information technology heavy console what we can we kind of look for in applicants, of course, is any kind of four year degree, but technical skills sort of mixed with communication skills. Most of this job is communication. So at least in the tech world, there’s sort of an intersection of technical skills and income skills, and that little circle where that intersects is really the folks that we’re looking for our system. It’s complex, but not overly complex. We can teach a lot of the IT and engineering concepts of the console once you’re here. So if someone has the ability to learn that, but also has sort of those natural communication skills where you can boil down sort of a complex idea into something that anyone can understand, either a flight director or management or whoever. Those are the kind of people that we’re looking for in our role.
Alex Arredondo
I think for ISO, it’s pretty specific also, but because they don’t teach you inventory and storage and mechanical engineering school, I think the biggest skill that one can learn is be a good team member, know how to communicate and be willing to accept that you’re wrong when others are right. It’s a really hard thing to do, but that’s how you grow, and that’s how you learn as an engineer, and how you become a good team members by being open minded and taking everyone’s considerations and opinions as valid.
Kelly Goodyear
Yeah, so for planning, I mean, it’s a similar a lot of the stem kind of degrees, as far as the background that that we’re we have feeding into our group. Um, problem solving is a huge part of of what we do, and I think what everyone does right. But I I equated the putting the timeline together like putting a puzzle together. And so I think having a desire to solve problems and find solutions is super important. I consider it a good bit like project management in a sense, especially for some of the experienced folks that are putting together, you know, a six month mission. That’s project management at its core. And then I can’t overstate what Josh said about communication. I mean, that is, that’s 90% of the job for a lot of us, if you can’t communicate your thoughts clearly, if you can’t have other people understand what you’re you’re saying and thinking or understand what they’re saying and thinking you’re, you’re going to spend a lot of time doing the wrong things or not doing the right things. Certainly inefficient. And so communication is super important, and I encourage anyone and everyone to continue to improve their communication skills as I take those classes as often as I can.
Alex Arredondo
Thankfully, we learned a lot about communication during boot camp using Legos and a bunch of other different games. I’m too
Kelly Goodyear
I’m too old. I didn’t get to do the Legos.
Joshua Dow
It was fun. I think another thing also is leadership and followership skills. It’s a really interesting job where on any given day you might be the lead of a couple projects, and then the same day you’re working in Mission Control, being, you know, following the flight directors lead at the same time leading your own team of people that are behind you. You know, because as the person in that room, you’re the person of authority for your system, but not for the station as a whole, right? So you’re sort of following the flight directors lead. So it’s a really interesting balance, and I think it’s something we teach really well. Here is leadership and followership all on the same day.
Courtney Beasley
And some of this may be the same, but what advice would you give to someone who one day hopes to become a flight controller?
Daniel Henkes
Yeah, for us, like if you, if you walk around our office, most of the people, not everyone, because we do have people from different backgrounds, but a lot of people like using their hands to fix things. Because if something breaks in their home, they usually want to try to fix it first and then buy something. So you’ll see a lot of those people. And really all it comes down to is problem solving and kind of the desire to get your hands dirty and do whatever, whatever maintenance comes up. And really like being able to go over to to our mock ups and and just work it out and figure out, you know, how did, how are we going to get this done? You’ll see a lot of that in our group.
Kelly Goodyear
I think problem solving is at the core of being a flight controller, wanting to get to the bottom of something, figuring out a way to do it, doing it better, faster, more efficient.
Alex Arredondo
Yeah, I think I’d want to say that people shouldn’t be afraid of taking on challenges because they feel like they can’t do it. They should take them on knowing that they can learn how to do it and that there’s people and resources out there to learn new skills and complete complex projects, and you know, you have it within yourself to be as great as you want to be, but it also takes a community and being willing to ask people around you.
Joshua Dow
And I would say, you know, go for it. I know when I was applying to this job, as well as a lot of other jobs that were out there, when I thought of a NASA flight controller, I thought they were looking for an Ivy League grad with a 4.0 GPA, and that’s just not the truth at all. The ISS is a really complex machine, and it needs a lot of interdisciplinary folks who are again, good problem solvers and communicators. But you don’t have to be the perfect student. You don’t have to be the perfect technical specialist or the perfect communicator. We need regular people that are really good at what they do and are kind of willing to work the mission.
Kelly Goodyear
I get passionate about it, I think a lot of us is a labor of love that brought us here and have kept us here for so many years. And so I think having a passion for the space program is certainly a huge benefit to maybe a bonus side to those night shifts and things like that, holidays, weekends.
Courtney Beasley
Teamwork seems to be the common theme in all of these podcast episodes that we record, which seems to be the core of NASA. I learned so much from each of you today about your console positions and about Mission Control. So thank you so much for coming on Houston We have a podcast today.
<Outro Music>
Thanks for sticking around. I hope you learned something new today. This is the fourth in a series of podcasts we are doing highlighting the roles of all of the different consoles in ISS mission control. Check out our previous episodes to learn more about ISS control, communications and crew health, and be on the lookout for two more Mission Control centric episodes in the coming months.
Our full collection of episodes is on nasa.gov/podcasts. You can also find the many other wonderful podcasts we have across the agency. On social media we are on the NASA Johnson Space Center pages of Facebook, X and Instagram. Use #AskNASA on your favorite platform to submit your idea or ask a question, just make sure to mention it’s for Houston We have a podcast.
This interview was recorded on December 18, 2024 thanks to Will Flato, Daniel Tohill, Dane Turner, and Dominique Crespo. Special thanks to Chelsey Ballarte, Jaden Jennings, and Flight Director Paul Konyha for helping us plan and set up these interviews. And of course, thanks again to our guests for taking the time to come on the show.
Give us a rating and feedback on whatever platform you’re listening to us on, and tell us what you think of our podcast. We’ll be back next week.